DAX To Rep Cumulus Streaming Sales

Yesterday Cumulus announced they had reached an agreement with DAX to exclusively rep their streaming ad sales on both Westwood One and the national side of their stations’ streaming inventory. The Cumulus sales teams will continue to sell inventory for their local clusters parallel to DAX’s efforts.

It’s getting more common for broadcasters and other audio-heavy publishers to outsource their sales efforts to third parties. This is partly due to the influx of media dollars going towards audio streaming – everyone is looking to get a piece of these growing budgets. There’s also a realization, especially among broadcasters, that selling the streaming side of their product is just flat out hard. Relying on regular local sales staff to sell inventory in their own markets is difficult enough. Then add in the challenge of selling nationally, which puts the broadcasters in competition with pureplays like Pandora and Spotify, and it’s easy to see why they may want help from a 3rd party.

The audio streamers are starting to get into more 3rd party relationships too. Katz has been repping Spotify for years now, and Pandora began selling SoundCloud’s US inventory this January. I’d expect this trend to continue as the more advanced audio sales orgs start to consolidate others’ inventory under their tents.